About Andrew J. Chamberlain

Andrew Chamberlain is a writer and creative writing tutor. He has ghost-written several commercially published memoirs, including the bestselling Once an Addict by Barry Woodward. His short stories and novel length fiction have been commercially and self-published, in print and online.

Since 2014 he has presented The Creative Writer’s Toolbelt, a podcast that gives practical advice on the craft of writing. Andrew’s focus is on providing accessible advice to writers that they can apply straight away to their own work. The Creative Writer’s Toolbelt Handbook, is a compilation of the very best advice and insight from the first 100 episodes of the podcast. With contributions from over twenty guests, the Handbook will cover all the fundamental dimensions of creative writing, with examples of best practice, from the writers, editors, and publishing professionals who have guested on the podcast.

Andrew is a blogger for the Association of Christian Writers at the More than Writers website, and has been a regular speaker at the Lakes School of Writing autumn retreat. He has spoken at numerous writing events across the country and was a panellist at last year’s Eastercon Science Fiction convention.

He lives in Cambridge with his wife and their slightly over enthusiastic labrador Pippin. You can contact Andrew via his website at www.andrewjchamberlain.com

(Material for this blog is adapted from my recently published book: The Creative Writer’s Toolbelt Handbook)

In the first blog in this series I suggested that there are only two fundamental requirements for your world-building to be successful, and these are that it be credible and immersive. In this post we look at what makes a setting immersive, and how we can build a world that will absorb and enthral the reader.

The Immersive Setting

Creating an immersive setting, one in which the readers can lose themselves is a challenge. Even if we’ve overcome the first hurdle and created a credible setting that the reader can trust, we still need to go beyond that and give our readers a setting that has the richness and variety to absorb them. We want them to feel an affinity with the world we present, and so create an emotional connection between the reader and our work.

The author J K Rowling says: “there’s always room for a story that can transport people to another place”. Part of our role is to prepare a place worth visiting.

When I interviewed the Canadian writer Derek Künsken for the podcast, he described himself as a ‘sense of wonder junkie’. All readers are looking for something like this, a sense of wonder that will immerse them in the story. In my interview with the writer Peter F Hamilton, he said:

You’ve got to give the reader the sense of wonder, the sense of escapism

People will always love stories with this kind of power and allure, but how do you create such a story? I want to give you three practical tools that will help you achieve this goal, and these can be summarised as:

Take the time to plan and create a backstory

Create a mood and style for your setting

Present the setting with sparse, specific, and sensory detail

We’ll look at each of these in turn, with some examples.

Creating a Backstory

Taking the time to plan the setting will help to support the credibility and immersive nature of our work, particularly with backstory. Backstory is the history and background that, as a writer, you create for your plot and for your characters; it sits in the background, hence its name, and much of it may not appear in your work.

J R R Tolkien created a vast backstory for his books, including histories, languages, and cultures for the races that featured in his work. J K Rowling also created a huge backstory for her Harry Potter series. She had reams of notes about characters, magical artefacts, histories, buildings, villages, in fact every aspect of her story.

This backstory might be completely a work of imagination, or it might involve real places, events and people, or a mix of the two. For example, if your story involves a character who is living in London in the late 1940’s, your backstory should comprise an accurate depiction of London from that time. This can include landmarks, historical events that impacted on the city, the roads, shops, parks and buildings that were in existence then. The backstory should take account of the prevailing political and economic situation in wartime Britain, and the cultural context of that time and place.

The aspects of your setting that you might need to think about are things like:

Geographical and natural features of your setting, including weather, temperature

Political arrangements for your location

Social and class structure

Economic conditions

Religious environment

Technological and scientific environment

The history of your world, especially those elements that contribute to the current situation

You can find lists of the factors to consider on the internet. The blogger J S Morin (jsmorin.com) gives a list of twenty ‘worldbuilding questions’ on his site which include things like:

Why is that city there?

What do the people eat?

Who rules the place?

What do people do for amusement?

What is the architecture like?

All stories need some planning and backstory development. Even writers who don’t use any traditional planning techniques still need to create a world that is coherent, and consistent, so for some this might be a case of checking the created world after it’s on the page rather than developing it beforehand.

Creating a Mood and Style Through Your Setting

The mood and feel of a setting influences how immersive it is. Readers may like some description, but they will positively warm to an evocative setting, full of sensory detail, flavour and texture.

Many of us have been captured by the beauty and vastness of Middle Earth. The majesty of that setting is built up gradually by Tolkien as he weaves descriptions of the setting into the story.

The most successful settings tend to capture the reader at the start of the story. So, for example, in the novel Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier brilliantly immerses her readers in the setting right at the start of her book. The evocative first sentence captures the mood and places us right with the main character and the house that will form the setting for the story:

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

With these few words, the writer gives Manderley an attractive mystique. The line also tells us that the narrator has been to Manderley before, and that this place has a powerful hold on her imagination. This sentence sets the dark tone that will feature throughout the book.

For a powerful cinematic example of this setting of scene and mood, consider the first scene of the film Apocalypse Now, where the hypnotic beat of helicopter rotor blades is mixed with the slow mournful rendition of The End by The Doors, and a peaceful scene of palm trees is obliterated by the smoke and fire of napalm bombs.

These opening scenes from literature and film are effective because they present evocative and potent elements of the setting immediately.

Sparse, specific, and sensory detail

The third feature of the immersive setting is that from the outset, it is presented with vivid, sensory description. In her book The House of Shattered Wings Aliette de Bodard uses this technique to present the One of the best ways to learn about sensory language is to look at the medium where each word absolutely must count, and that’s poetry.

Here for example is the first stanza of Ode to Autumn by John Keats

SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness!

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;

To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

This is rather an ‘old-school’ example but it does show some of the power of sensory language, especially touch and texture, taste and warmth. With just a few lines Keats has created for us a rich and varied environment. The author Al Robertson says that poetry has taught him to think very precisely about words, it is this precision that generates the immersive, sensory language that will absorb the reader.

It is this overall feel of the setting, supported by a vividness of description, and consistency that is so important to a story. It is achieved not simply by throwing a selection of random elements together, rather it requires that our setting be credible – that readers feel able to trust its arrangement and consistency, and that it be immersive – that the specific descriptions, especially the sensory descriptions, immerse the reader in the specific style and environment you’ve created for them.

(Material for this blog is adapted from my recently published book: The Creative Writer’s Toolbelt Handbook)

The world you create for your work is the place where your story happens. It could be a world, a universe, or inside someone’s head. It is characterised by factors like geography and culture, climate and religion, commerce and politics. A story may have one or many settings; so for example, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is set at the turn of the 19th century, in Hertfordshire and London.

Ernest Hemmingway’s The Old Man and the Sea is set in the late 1940’s, mainly in a little fishing boat off the coast of Cuba, near the capital Havana.

Winter in Madrid by C J Sansom is set in that city in 1940, just after the civil war.

Ian McDonald’s Brasyl is set Brazil across three time periods: 2006, 2032, and 1732.

Some books are set in places we know and could visit, others are set in places which are either fantasy, like Middle Earth, or are an amalgam of the world we know and the fantasy world of the author, like the world inhabited by Harry Potter.

Whilst there is a wide range of possible settings for a story, there are only two fundamental requirements for your world-building to be successful, and these are that it be credible and immersive. In this post we look at what makes a setting credible, and how we can give our world the credibility that will gain it the trust of the reader.

The Credible Setting

The dictionary definition of the word ‘credible’ is something that is possible to believe, something that is convincing. This definition nicely encapsulates the nuances of this first requirement because a setting – the reader must find it believable, in the sense that they might believe in a character; but the setting, like the character, does not have to be real.

This distinction between ‘credible’ and ‘real’ is important because it reinforces that fact that stories don’t work because the things they describe exist, they work because the reader is prepared to believe in them. Perhaps our main task as writers is to encourage the reader to place that kind of trust in our work.

So, for example, not every James Bond action scene has to be true to life. Most of the fight scenes we see, or read about, aren’t a true reflection of actual violence. Humans are not that resilient; real fights would not last as long or be as choreographed as fictional fight scenes, but in the context of the story this doesn’t matter; we watch the film and we believe.

The reader needs to believe in what’s happening in the worlds we create, and then they can forget about the elements of setting, and immerse themselves in the story. To do this they need to believe in the setting so that they are not distracted by it, not trying to pick holes in it. Rather, at the subconscious level they accept the world you have presented, and so can focus on the story.

Consistency

To achieve the required level of credibility, the world we build must be consistent within itself, so it must not contain errors which, if the reader spots them, will throw her out of the story.

Readers make all sorts of assumptions about a setting when they start a story, especially if this is a genre story like a fantasy, a police procedural, or an historical novel. The reader willingly suspends their disbelief, and will continue to do so as long as the story seems to be authentic, and true to itself.

To give you some extreme examples of this, just imagine reading The Lord of the Rings, and finding that when Gandalf is stuck at the top of the Tower at Isengard, he simply gets his cell phone out and calls for help. It might be temporarily funny, but in the long term this huge error would destroy the consistency of the setting, and damage the story itself.

Or imagine a police procedural where there are simply not enough clues for the reader to have any chance of working out who the murderer is.

This needs for consistency applies to characters as well as setting. It’s frighteningly easy to jar the reader out of the story with even a small inconsistency. If one of the features of a character changes: hair colour, height, a tattoo, whether they’re left or right handed, this slip will jolt the reader out of the story, unless these inconsistencies are a specific conceit of the novel.